Why did Dr. Korby commit suicide?
- Thread starter Jedi_Master
- Start date
Well, that's her side of the issue. Quite possibly, though, she had merely forgotten in the intervening years that Roger Korby had been exactly like this all along. I mean, just look at the guy's career choices!
The "attempts at contact" issue is interesting: how is interstellar communication supposed to work in TOS? How commonplace are interstellar communicators? Can any alien device send a message that Earthlings could receive and decipher? Kirk's own brother supposedly was a "radio amateur" with his own callsign - yet Jim had not been in contact with Sam for "over a year", and Sam had not contacted the outside world about the plight of Deneva, nor had any other Denevan. That is, no other Denevan out of the millions had contacted the rest of mankind for any reason in the past year!
It almost sounds as if making contact is an exceptional achievement, even when one possesses the right equipment for the job.
Timo Saloniemi
The episode addressed all that. The Korby-bot did realize he wasn't human, Chapel was not being "narrow-minded" and his innards were not all that had changed, which is a major point of the episode. Korby's transformation is foreshadowed by Dr. Brown, when he speaks of the original inhabitants moving "from light to darkness" and becoming a "mechanistic culture." And indeed, when it comes time to prove to Christine that he's the man she loves, his appeals are indeed (to his own surprise) mechanistic: "Ask me to solve... Equate! ... Transmit! ..." "Does this make such a difference?" he asks about his exposed mechanical hand, then answers his own question a few seconds later: "You cannot love, you're not human" he tells Andrea, with a sad smile of resignation that shows he's referring to himself, too.
I usually find Michael Strong a fairly bland actor, but what he does in the final scene as Korby is really good and makes me wonder if I've just missed seeing him with better material.
Collard Greens and pigs feet with Sweet Potato Pie are hard to get out that far.
The acting of the male leads in this episode was quite excellent. Shatner shows some subtlety and even (shocker) underplays a few scenes to great effect, and Strong is rather good, especially as he had material that had it been handled badly would have been disastrous.
Timo, Dr. Korby's reputation, as it is portrayed in the episode is almost god-like. He is a genius, and a bold adventurer who has helped the Federation in immeasurable ways. I would think his "career choices" were one of the things that drew Chapel to him.
Yes...Korby realized he was a hollow imitation, which cannot capture the intangible soul; no matter how much belief he invested in his desperation to become immortal via the transfer, he simply copy+pasted learned experiences/knowledge into an artificial form, but that which makes humans human was beyond science.
Chapel was correct in rejecting him--telling him that his actions proved that he was not Korby (human)--rather than con herself into accepting a "relationship" with a glorified hard drive with a survivalist mentality, stuffed inside of a mannequin.
It sounds like he could have been the fourth friend of Dorothy...
I'll miss you most of all... Korby.
Wonder what Kirk and the federation would have done if korby didn't kill himself ?
Robot korby could have settled down with his robot partner Andrea (lucky dude!)
And.... The machinery was still intact. Don't you think that the federation would send a scientific party to Learn its secrets?
Robot korby could have settled down with his robot partner Andrea (lucky dude!)
And.... The machinery was still intact. Don't you think that the federation would send a scientific party to Learn its secrets?
I read one called Double, Double.
There was another (duplicate) Brown far away from the action and came back and started making more androids.
Exactly. And now he has embarked on a greater adventure than all the previous ones put together, leaving his mortal coil behind. What's so new about him here? Did he not "solve, equate and transmit" all the time when his nose was buried deep in Orion ruins and Chapel was enjoying little else but the sight of his butt sticking up?
He may have been a romantic Indiana Jones in his day, sure, and that would denote a definite change. But what are the odds of that outside the Indiana Jones universe? And we know Chapel's type anyway: watching "The Naked Time", "Amok Time" or "Mudd's Passion" helps there.
Timo Saloniemi
I really find it odd that you appear to be blaming a character flaw in Christine Chapel for the breakup of her and Dr. Korby's relationship.
Everything as written and performed in the episode points toward the the android version being fundamentally different from Korby. If the intention had been to show the android as exactly the same as Korby but misunderstood by Chapel it could have been done, but it's just not supported by what's there.
That's basically because Chapel's character flaw is such a despicable one: racist narrowmindedness and disgust.
That also touches on why writer intent counts for so little in the endgame. TOS when aired was already a conservative show about conservative themes, portrayed relatively conservatively; by the 2010s, it's well and truly ossified in terms of morals and lessons. This in no way lessens the dramatic merits of the stories, of course, and in fact offers all-new ways to enjoy the stories: as depictions of a possible future rather than merely "1960s US in spaaaaaace!".
From the viewpoint of that future, though, the writers must be considered racist assholes, the same way they are sexist assholes as viewed from our current vantage point. It's not their fault: they couldn't have known, and shouldn't have minded even if told. Times change. But writing all this anti-cyborg prejudice as being part of the character of the heroes turns them into villains in the modern view. Which is also for the better, as villains make for good protagonists in modern TV drama...
Timo Saloniemi
Nope.
Yes, Korby the android was only misrepresenting himself, kidnapping people, subjecting them to duplication against their will, scheming to take over a government vessel, and planning to introduce android domination to other worlds. Of course, the only possible explanation for Chapel's negative reaction is her narrow-mindedness!
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